DAILY NEWS: New This Week: Fall's Indie Rush Begins

(indieWIRE/10.10.01) — This week’s independent field is cluttered withnew releases, from avant-garde and documentary, to auteurist and Indiewood.You want challenging French art film, you got it. You want American indiemusical, you got that, too. Within the crowded slate of new films, lessthan half are from studio-financed specialty outfits. The rest comes froma hodgepodge of self-distributed pictures, new indie distribs, and arthousestandbys like Artistic License — many of whom pushed back dates afterSept. 11 and finally hit theaters this week.

A company like Artistic faces major challenges with every release. Withlimited P and A budgets, a small staff, and movies that aren’t exactlysyrupy “Serendipity,” it makes you wonder how they survive. Take theirrelease this week of “The American Astronaut,” for instance, which alreadyhad posters made with an earlier opening date. Add to that, it’s “a musicallydriven low-tech, sci-fi space western,” according to its director-writer-star-musician Cory McAbee, shot in black and white, and more surreal than most anything you’ve seen on the big screen all year. Before its Sundance 2001 premiere, McAbee told indieWIRE, “I’m not afraid to be lumped together with the big boys…This movie is going to entertain the fuck out of people.” While certain post-Sundance reviews may haveindicated otherwise, McAbee’s vision remains singular, and true to the nameof its distributor, artistic. As the film enters the packed distributionarena, the words of William Perkins, one of the producers, still remaintrue after Park City. “We made the film on our own terms. Now we just haveto see if that pays off and whether or not we get muscled aside.”

Doing the muscling will most likely be Miramax, as they try to capitalize onthe success of Chinese crossover hit, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” withthis week’s “Iron Monkey,” directed by “Dragon” fight choreographer YuenWo-Ping. With commercials that make the film look practically identical toAng Lee‘s martial arts epic, it also makes you wonder: where does originallyof vision now lie?

Certainly not in this week’s other major Indiewood release, ChristineLahti‘s “My First Mister,” from Paramount Classics. The opening night film at Sundance 2001, actress-turned-director Lahti’s first work looks at therelationship between a rebellious 17-year-old girl (Leelee Sobieski) and alonely 49-year-old man (Albert Brooks) with the lens of an after schoolspecial. “By refusing to ever answer or cope with the question of sexualattraction between the two, ‘My First Mister,'” wrote Patrick Z. McGavin forindieWIRE, “is the worst kind of tease.” The complete review is availableat:

For a more audacious and courageous depiction of teenage sexuality, there’sno better place than the work of controversial French director CatherineBreillat (“A Young Girl,” “Romance“). “Fat Girl,” opening in New York today from Cowboy Pictures, premiered in Berlin 2001, where Eddie Cockrell wrote for indieWIRE, “Another defiantly individualist step…,’Fat Girl’ bothprovokes and haunts.” The complete review is at:

In light of current events, “Yana’s Friends,” a new film by Israel-basedRussian director Arik Kaplun, also sounds like it will provoke. Winner often top Israeli film awards, and winner of the Grand Prix, and the BestActress award at Karlovy Vary, the film is set in Israel in 1991 during theGulf War and follows two newly immigrated Russian families, trying to loveand live amidst the looming threat of Iraqi missiles. The movie is beingdistributed by Friends of Film Distribution, which turns out to be RobertStern, a retired businessman from Seattle who fell in love with the movieafter seeing it at the Seattle Film Festival and chose to release ithimself. After New York, first-time distributor Stern has booked dates inLos Angeles and Seattle.

Another self-distribution effort, Danny Hoch‘s long-awaited “Jails,Hospitals and Hip Hop,” an adaptation of his one-man show, will also haveits U.S. theatrical premiere this weekend. Originally to be distributed byStratosphere Entertainment last year, executive producers Michael Skolnikand William O’Neill of New York-based Kicked Down Productions will now handle the film’s release. (At one point, indieWIRE heard that the film wascaught up in music rights issues.) Co-directed by Hoch and Mark Benjamin(“The Last Party” and cinematographer of Hoch’s last effort “Whiteboys“),the film features Hoch’s trademark multiple personality performance, as heportrays 10 different characters from a corrections officer to a rap fan. Aprizewinner at the New York International Latino Film Festival andUrbanworld, “Jails” will go on a “guerilla-style” distribution tour,starting at New York’s Cinema Village Theater.

Jon Dichter‘s American independent debut film, “The Operator” will also see theater time this week. After garnering solid spots at domestic fests SXSWand Santa Barbara, “The Operator” garnered enough positive word-of-mouth tospringboard the film to limited distribution (beginning at busy NYC indiearthouse, The Angelika, no less). In her Variety review, Lael Loewnsteinwrote, “‘The Operator’ is a mostly slick, intelligent psychologicalthriller-modern morality tale flawed by occasional lapses of subtlety and acentral performance that veers just to the wrong side of empathetic…Still, pic indicates a promising future for writer-director.”

Rounding out the crowded release calendar are two documentaries, oneuplifting, the other more complex and sobering. Sony Pictures Classics willrelease Gillian Grisman‘s “Grateful Dawg,” about the relationship betweenJerry Garcia of the “Grateful Dead” and fellow musician David “Dawg”Grisman, the filmmaker’s father. A crowd-pleaser with never before seenfootage of the music and the times, the film prompted many music-relatedprogramming at fests from Telluride to Newport.

On the other end of the spectrum is New Yorker Films‘ release of “Sobibor,October 14, 1943, 4 P.M.” the latest documentary from Claude Lanzmann,creator of the 1985 landmark Holocaust chronicle, “Shoah.” In Lanzmann’sstraightforward interview style, he speaks with one of the survivors of thefamous uprising at Poland’s Sobibor extermination camp. Originally shot in1979 as part of “Shoah,” Lanzmann decided the story needed a film of itsown. [Anthony Kaufman]